“Even one like mine?” I said. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would take any particular pleasure in looking at my face, either for the first or for the thousand and first time. Raymond ignored me and began to rummage in his pockets.
I thought about his suggestion while he lit up another cigarette. I could still purchase vodka and birthday flowers on the way home, after all, and it might be interesting to see the inside of another person’s home. I tried to think of the last time I had done so. I had stood in the hallway of my downstairs neighbors’ flat a couple of years ago, when I was delivering a parcel I’d taken in for them. The place had smelled strongly of onions, and there was an ugly standard lamp in the corner. A few years before that, one of the receptionists had hosted a party at her flat and invited all the women from work. It was a beautiful flat, a traditional tenement with stained glass and mahogany and elaborate cornices. The “party,” however, had merely been a pretext, a ruse of sorts to provide her with the opportunity to attempt to sell us sex toys. It was a most unedifying spectacle: seventeen drunken women comparing the efficacy of a range of alarmingly large vibrators. I left after ten minutes, having downed a tepid glass of Pinot Grigio and parried an outrageously impertinent question from a cousin of the host about my private life.
I’m familiar with the concept of bacchanalia and Dionysian revels, of course, but it strikes me as utterly bizarre that women should want to spend an evening together drinking and purchasing such items, and, indeed, that this should pass as “entertainment.” Sexual union between lovers should be a sacred, private thing. It should not be a topic for discussion with strangers over a display of edible underwear. When the musician and I spent our first night together, the joining of our bodies would mirror the joining of our minds, our souls. His otherness, the flash of dark hair in his armpit, the buttons of bone at his clavicle. The blood scent in the crook of his elbow. The warm softness of his lips, as he takes me in his arms and . . .
“Erm, Eleanor? Hello? I was just saying . . . we’ll need to go now to catch the bus, if you’re coming to Mum’s?”
I dragged myself back to the unwelcome present and the squat figure of Raymond, with his grubby hooded sweatshirt and dirty training shoes. Perhaps Raymond’s mother would prove intelligent and charming company. I doubted it, based on the evidence of her progeny, but one never knew.
“Yes, Raymond. I will accompany you to your mother’s house,” I said.
10
Of course Raymond didn’t have a car. I would guess he was in his midthirties, but there was something adolescent, not fully formed, about him. It was partly the way he dressed, of course. I had yet to see him in normal, leather footwear; he wore training shoes at all times, and seemed to own a wide range of colors and styles. I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sportswear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity.
Sport is a mystery to me. In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph, winning prizes for jumping fastest in a sack, or running from Point A to Point B more quickly than their classmates. How they loved to wear those badges on their blazers the next day! As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.
At secondary school, PE was simply unfathomable. We had to wear special clothes and then run endlessly around a field, occasionally being told to hold a metal tube and pass it to someone else. If we weren’t running, we were jumping, into a sandpit or over a small bar on legs. There was a special way of doing this; you couldn’t simply run and jump, you had to do some strange sort of hop and skip first. I asked why, but none of the PE teachers (most of whom, as far as I could ascertain, would struggle to tell you the time) could furnish me with an answer. All of these seemed strange activities to impose on young people with no interest in them, and indeed I’m certain that they merely served to alienate the majority of us from physical activity for life. Fortunately, I am naturally lithe and elegant of limb, and I enjoy walking, so I have always kept myself in a reasonable state of physical fitness. Mummy has a particular loathing for the overweight (“Greedy, lazy beast,” she’d hiss, if one waddled past us in the street) and I may perhaps have internalized this view to some extent.
Raymond wasn’t overweight, but he was doughy and a bit paunchy. None of his muscles were visible, and I suspect he only ever used the ones in his forearms with any degree of regularity. His sartorial choices did not flatter his unprepossessing physique: slouchy denims, baggy T-shirts with childish slogans and images. He dressed like a boy rather than a man. His toilette was sloppy too, and he was usually unshaven—it was not a beard as such, but patchy stubble, which merely served to make him look unkempt. His hair, a mousy, dirty blond, was cut short and had been given minimal attention—at most, perhaps a rub with a grubby towel after washing. The overall impression was of a man who, whilst not exactly a vagrant, had certainly slept rough in a flophouse or on a stranger’s floor the previous evening.
“Here’s our bus, Eleanor,” Raymond said, nudging me rudely. I had my travel pass ready but, typically, Raymond did not possess one, preferring to pay well over the odds for want of a few moment’s advance planning. He did not, it transpired, even have the correct change, and so I had to lend him a pound. I would be sure to recoup it at work tomorrow.
The journey to his mother’s house took about twenty minutes, during which I explained the benefits of a travel pass to him, including where one could purchase such an item and how many journeys one needed to take in order to break even or, indeed, to effectively travel for free. He did not seem particularly interested, and didn’t even thank me when I’d finished. He is a spectacularly unsophisticated conversationalist.
We walked through a small estate of square white homes; there were four different house designs interspersed in a predictable pattern. Each had a newish car in the driveway, and evidence of children—small bicycles with stabilizers, a basketball hoop fixed to the garage wall—but there was neither sight nor sound of any. The streets were all named after poets—Wordsworth Lane, Shelley Close, Keats Rise—no doubt chosen by the building company’s Marketing Department. They were all poets that the kind of person who’d aspire to such a home would recognize, poets who wrote about urns and flowers and wandering clouds. Based on past experience, I’d be more likely to end up living in Dante Lane or Poe Crescent.
I was very familiar with such environs, having lived in several virtually identical houses in virtually identical streets during foster placements. There would be no pensioners here, no friends sharing a house and no one living alone, save for the occasional transitory divorcé. Newish cars lined up in driveways, two per house, ideally. Families came and went, and the whole place felt temporary, somehow, like theatrical scenery that had been hastily assembled and could be shifted at any time. I shuddered, chasing away the memories.
Raymond’s mother lived in a neat terrace behind the newer houses, a row of tiny pebble-dashed semis. It was social housing; the streets here were named after obscure local politicians. Those who had purchased their homes had fitted UPVC double-glazed front doors, or added little porches. Raymond’s family homestead was unmodified.